Thus we left the staid brother and sister quietly gratified by our call, and returning to Nieder Olang found the kellnerin of the now deserted inn awaiting us with a nosegay of stately white lilies.  The gig too was ready, and with our dear friend E——­ at our side we drove homeward in the silent summer evening.  We passed Percha, a small group of peaceful houses and a church, contrasting forcibly with the wild, tumultuous scenes which it must have witnessed when the enthusiast Von Kolb and his companions convulsed the peasantry;—­and passed over the upland plains where the ten thousand peasants had been repulsed and scattered—­a corn-giving land, affluent with myriad golden shocks, like a perpetual Joseph’s dream.

* * * * *

The Hof proved too quiet and healthful a resting-place, and its inmates too genuinely good and honest, for us to bid it a lasting farewell in ’71.  Behold us, therefore, in the following summer again within its friendly walls, where we at first settled down to a harmonious, industrious routine of several weeks:  then an extreme desire seizing upon some of us to see more of the glories of mountain and valley around, we set out one and all for six days of pure holiday enjoyment; part of the programme being for the more adventurous, attended by Moidel, to climb to the Olm on a visit to Jakob.

MARGARET HOWITT.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

WITH THE AMERICAN AMBULANCE CORPS AT PARIS.

We were sitting under the trees in the Champs Elysees, in sight of the ruined Tuileries, when my friend gave me the following reminiscences.  In repeating what I can recall of them, as nearly as I can in his own language, I shall use names with almost as great freedom as he did—­a fact for which I think I owe no apology.

“Restore that wreck of the Tuileries,” said my friend—­but I shall let him tell his story without quotation-marks, and without the interruption of my urging and questionings, that finally got him almost as much interested in his subject as I was myself—­Restore that wreck of the Tuileries, and these gay equipages and these loiterers in the Avenue would repeat for you, very nearly, the scene of my first service with the American ambulance.  That was before I was a regular member of the corps—­in fact, before the corps which operated at the siege of Paris had been properly formed.  Dr. Sims, Dr. Tom Pratt, Frank Hayden and others, with three ambulance-wagons, were going to the front:  we heard a great deal of "a Berlin!" in the streets in those days.  I came down this way to the Palais d’Industrie to see them off, and when I did see the American ladies raising the colors to march through the crowd, I couldn’t help taking part in the procession.  So I put on the brassard of Geneva—­a red cross on a white band strapped on the arm, being the ambulance badge established in 1864 by the International Convention of Geneva—­and seized one of the sticks with a sack on the end of it, and began asking contributions for the wounded as the cortege moved on.